Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much funding his Department provides for Legal Aid for women.

Legal aid is available, subject to the case being in scope and all relevant eligibility criteria being met, irrespective of the applicant’s gender.

The Legal Aid Agency (LAA) publishes client diversity statistics on an annual basis as part of its official statistics [tables 11.1-11.5]. Legal aid diversity information over time can be accessed via the Legal Aid Client Diversity Statistics Dashboard. The diversity statistics include information on the volume of legal aid clients broken down by gender across all legal aid schemes. It is not mandatory to complete the equality and diversity sections of the legal aid application form and so in some instances the gender of the applicant will be recorded as ‘unknown’. Since the introduction of Crime Apply in August 2024 it has not been possible to collect diversity data, including gender, in connection with Crime Higher applications.

As diversity data is only collected at application stage corresponding information about expenditure broken down by gender of the applicant would require an element of manual review and could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.